Fauxreel Immortalizes Local Tai Chi Practitioners in Toronto

August 23, 2014 Artists

“It’s nice to install photo-based portraits that have permanency,” Toronto based Street Artist Fauxreel, otherwise known as Dan Bergeron, tells us. In his new series of works in the public sphere you’ll agree that it isn’t strictly Street Art since it is an approved and organized installation, but even so it retains the markings of a D.I.Y. conceptualized series that follows the vision of one artist. The subjects here are residents from the area who come to Grange Park in the morning to do Tai Chi exercises and possibly to glance upward at the Ontario College of Art and Design’s Sharp Centre that hovers above like a black and white checkered Memphis-Milano tabletop on multi-colored stilts. These new series of works were commissioned as part of StreetART Toronto.

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Dan Begeron AKA Faux Reel. Grange Park. Toronto, Canada. August 2014. (photo © Dan Bergeron)

This isn’t Fauxreel’s first project with the residents of this area. BSA first covered him in 2008 when we first met him after seeing his work on New York streets (see Regent of the People for Real). Bergeron’s work with the community is given a more durable quality this time than his earlier large wheatpastes and wood cut silhouettes of people on the street, mounted as they are on tiles but similar to his earlier works, they focus on populations within the community.

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Dan Begeron AKA Faux Reel. Grange Park. Toronto, Canada. August 2014. (photo © Dan Bergeron)

The human forms and various poses are grounding from a human point of view. They also appear to hover above the ground in a spirit-like manner as if astute talismen and erudite taliswomen for the neighborhood. Ironically, the models are posed in front of facades that have been hit up with various aerosol tags, yet the neighborhood they are hung in is as clean as Disney World.

Dan Begeron AKA Faux Reel. Grange Park. Toronto, Canada. August 2014. (photo © Dan Bergeron)

While clearly this is public art, it retains some of the influences we have experienced with the sudden and immediate interaction one can have with photographic unilateral installations done by freethinkers and rebels on the Street Art scene. Let’s see how long these pieces run before being defaced or added to by those more traditional practitioners. Who knows? – maybe they will remain untouched.

Dan Begeron AKA Faux Reel. Grange Park. Toronto, Canada. August 2014. (photo © Dan Bergeron)

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